 All right. Are you guys ready? Ready to make some change and get some things started. I'm so happy to see your face in the place today. Please give yourself a round of applause for being making a difference and putting your words into effect and some action in the community. We love that very much. I'm going to start off by actually... Is Ivy Taylor here? Okay. I'm going to actually start off by asking Mr. James Howard to come to the front. You know, the last time we had this meeting we rushed off to go see the Spurs play in the finals and now they're champions. So I had to put my shirt on. We have a championship city building a championship school. Thank you. Good evening. Good evening. All right. We come to do a little work here today. One of the things I want to say is we want to welcome you to Wheatley. Bill is Wheatley Middle School. I was told to say that by the Alumni Association and also my classmate that we want to make sure that Wheatley remains Phyllis Wheatley. So it will be Phyllis Wheatley Middle School or Community School. Now, one of the things I do want to say that this community is getting an infusion of nearly $80 million. That $80 million is supposed to change the face of this community. And a major portion of that or a central focus of that is this school. Wheatley Middle School will play a major role in the investments as well as the improvement of this community. As you see already across the street, the Wheatley Court is beginning to be torn down and rebuild. There's also going to be infrastructure around the courts as well as this school. And one of the things I want to assure you that this school will remain a school. And it will remain a middle school and it will remain Phyllis Wheatley Middle School. So I want to let you know that up front. But one of the things we have to do as a school district, as an inner city school district, we have to focus on adapting to the changes of the times. And that adaptation is about making this school more accessible to the community. And by changing this into a community school, I think we will answer that call. Now coming up in August, there's going to be another event. And that event is to begin the implementation of various programs. We want to do this in phases or increments. That event between August and September is to begin the implementation of the various programs that we want to begin between September and January. Now these programs are basically going to be before school or after school programs. But it's going to be very important that you play a role in what those programs will be. And so we're asking you, one of your tasks tonight is to begin talks about those programs and how we're going to implement those things. And so we just want to assure you that we know that there's concerns in the community. But the major thing is that we want you to know that the children in this school will be safe. There will be precautions made into the implementation plan that will implement safety issues. Or address those safety issues. So without further ado, I just want to thank you. Welcome you to Wheatley Middle School. And on behalf of the Board of Education, as well as our superintendent, let's get it going. Thank you so much. Thank you, John. Thank you so much. I'm going to bring Ivy Taylor up to the mic. My favorite councilwoman. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. How are y'all doing? We appreciate you coming out again, spending your precious time to help us envision even better Phyllis Wheatley Middle School, a place that will be the centerpiece of our community redevelopment efforts. I think most of you have, I know I've seen several of you at some of the other meetings, so you may have heard my spiel about East Point. But for anyone that missed it, we are in the middle of a comprehensive community revitalization effort here on the east side. And we are building on the assets that we already have, the history, the culture, the people who have been here for years in neighborhoods. We are building on that to make the school and the community even better place to be. We're welcoming the new people who are choosing to live in this part of town. And we are creating new amenities so that we can retain the folks that have been here and continue to attract even more people. Now, education in the schools really is central to any community being a strong, thriving place where people want to be. That's why the work that you're doing here this evening is so important, because we want Wheatley to be really at the, we know it's at the center of your hearts. We want it to be at the center of the community so that you wouldn't just come up here if you had a kid in school, but that there would be something for everyone in the community, something that everyone could benefit from right here at Wheatley Middle School. Building on the resources that SAISD has already invested in this community and building on the tremendous history of Phyllis Wheatley Middle School. So again, I appreciate everyone's involvement and I'm looking forward to the final plan and us actually implementing it. So thank you again for being here. Thank you Ivy. It really is an exciting time and today is one of those how we're going to get things done. But let's figure out what we did last time we met in meeting two. What we accomplished, how to have the community involved while providing safety, choosing the entrances of the community services that will be provided. The entrance that we actually came in today was the second choice that we chose from last week. And we met with great community minded residents of course and learned more about what is happening for the Phyllis Wheatley Community School. What we heard in the meeting, how to interact with the community while keeping everyone safe. Old mindsets that focus on fears that hinder future progress. And of course this is one of the things, it's more like safety because we want to keep our history safe. But we also have to make sure that we open the doors for our children to create a history as well. So that's why we're here. That was some of the concerns we had. And then the improvements that we did. I know the number one thing was we met in the auditorium before, now we're here today. So I'm hoping the sound is a lot better today and you'll be able to talk to each other a lot easier. We also suggest that you televise this event to get more community involvement. As these projects go on, there will be more media that gets involved to make sure that we really get the word out in the streets to the people who actually live here. So that's very important. The goals of this process today is to identify the program and to sign opportunities at the Phyllis Wheatley School that addresses long standing community concerns and opportunities. We also want to develop these ideas and find partnerships to help implement them and create a concrete action plan for implementation. Now the guidelines for today is we obviously got to be inclusive. We want to make sure everyone's voice is heard and we want to know exactly what it is that you're saying and what we need to follow up on. Encourage open, honest and direct conversation. We want everybody's opinions but we also want to make sure we don't take up too much time just giving our own opinions. Make sure everybody at the table gets a chance to talk. Understand everyone has expertise in something. We all have a God given talent and a gift and that's the same thing with our knowledge that we have here today. So let's be respectful for everyone that is in the room. And if you need to clarify a question when necessary, please ask. There's no stupid questions and we've all known that. So our analysis for meeting two, thanks very much. Basically we accomplished three major tasks out of all that wonderful work that was done at the last meeting. And I think we kind of need to give ourselves cheers and applause again for that because that was incredible under very difficult circumstances. Okay, we read and we cataloged everything from meeting two, all the writing on the thoughts, all the ideas. We analyzed the ideas that were given for the frequency with which they occurred and for whether or not they were similar or dissimilar. And the third thing we did was we made a synthesis of all that information into what you see today. And I think those sheets are on your tables. One of the major things that happened in the last meeting was that we had very significant and important discussions about access and safety for the hours of the day that make up the school time and the hours of the day that will make up community access time. So the blue lines indicate one of the tables ideas for community access during school hours and the red outlines indicate access for non-school hours. So this is an example of one of those tables work. Okay, we had 13 major items that are activities that folks wanted to have available while school was in session. And they range from after school programs to expanding programs for over age students. Literacy programs are in there tutoring, all of that. The second set of 13 items are things that people wanted to have available when school was not in session. Small Business Development Center, after school programs, tutoring, college readiness programs, mentoring, literacy programs. We wanted to expand over age student programs again in the evening. Social services, community clinics, computer access, job training, behavioral health services, and ESL programs. And again, to reinforce what was said earlier, the main entrance had 60 people who were interested in having that used as a community entrance. And the second most popular choice was the entrance that we came in this evening for our meeting today. The third was an auditorium entrance and the fourth was a library gym entrance. And there we go. Before you start, Stephen, because you have a lot of awesome information. We have an awesome prize that we're going to give out later on today, but I need to make sure everybody is registered for it. So I have some tickets as Stephen is explaining. If you don't have a ticket, then just raise your hand so I can make sure you get one, okay? Well, one of the things we heard loud and clear in the last meeting, and this is a direct quote from one of the tables. Put us to work. Put this community work. Let the community work to build a community school, right? Don't have the school district build a community school necessarily. Don't have some consultant build a community school. If it's going to be a real live community school, it needs to be built by the community. It needs to be built with programs that the community has brought to the table. So that's what we're going to do in this meeting. We're going to be looking at what happened in the first meeting was we identified, you identified, the kind of programs that you felt like you need in this community that you don't have already. In the second meeting, we said, well, how would those programs fit in this building? How can we make sure that it's safe? How can we make sure that the kids and the grown-ups don't come crossing over each other during the daytime? So that's why we have some programs that can happen before school and after school and some programs that could happen during the daytime, but we're not going to be looking at those kind of programs, frankly, until January. This first phase of the programming is going to be just kind of a test, kind of taking it one step at a time about let's just get programs that we know can work before school and after school and on the weekends and let's test this thing out and work all the bugs out of it before we start bringing adults and kids together and that wouldn't happen until beginning in January. Does that make sense? Kind of take it slow. Get it right. So what we're going to do today is the third thing is you said put us to work. Let us be involved in some of these programs. Maybe you can run some of these programs. Maybe you can help get some of these programs started. Maybe you can work in some of these programs. There might be jobs for here for some of the people in this community running some of these programs because the community needs to have the first choice of getting those jobs. The money needs to stay in this community. So in order to do that, we want to be sure that we have a good idea about all the talent that's in this room right now and where you think you would like to participate. Right? Everybody's got their own expertise and everything, their own thing to bring to the table. All right? Next one. What we tried to do here then is we, you might remember that we talked about this earlier that we have a way of, we're bringing to actually to the San Antonio community a method for how to put different programs in different categories. Some of these programs are physical programs. They might be programs to modify the building or to do landscaping or to do physical recreation or something like that. Some of the programs might be cultural programs. They might have to do with some African American celebration or some Latino celebration or some Anglo celebration or it might have to do with different crafts or something that are involved in cultural programs. So we have that as a category too. We have the physical programs. We have cultural programs. You have, and we're just putting them in these categories. All right? We have social programs, social programs like health programs, family service programs, those kinds of programs, what will all be involved in social domain of programming. And then we have educational programs. That's not just what happens in the school, but it's workforce training programs. It's adult education programs. It could be early childhood programs. We also have organizational programs like for example leadership training and trying to help community organizations learn how to raise money and write grants and that kind of stuff. That might be falling in this organizational category. And then we also have economic category. That might be involved in writing grants and fundraising. It might be involved in trying to figure out how to get some of this promised neighborhood money to make sure where it's going and track it so the community is tracking it. So it's not off somewhere, somebody else tracking it. With the promised neighborhood money, the choice neighborhood money, the promised zone money, all of that stuff, it could fall in that economic domain for all those people that might be interested in that part of it. Right? And we believe, we understand that everybody in this room is not interested in all of those things, but each one of you have a different talent to bring. So what we've done is we've taken the programs that you gave us. You made the list of programs. It's always just been read out. And we're drilling down on every one of those programs and when you see this report in August, you're going to see every program is going to have a sheet like this that describes the program and how it could work. The program that you created, the community created, and what's it going to look like and what's it going to take to run it. We also have a questionnaire that's gone out to all the key stakeholder groups, all the organizational groups to answer, are you already doing a program like this? We don't want to start a program if one's already in place. So we don't want to duplicate. So that survey is going out. So that's also going to be a part of the tools that you can use to make these programs happen. So what we've done is we've taken the programs that you created in our first meeting and we've put them in these six different categories that I just described. And on your table, and I'm not going to get into this because Nika's going to do that, but all of those programs have been placed in these different categories. And tonight, we're going to ask you, since you said put us to work, we're going to ask you to show us which one of those programs do you want to be involved in and what kind of skill sets can you bring to the table and that'll give the school district and the folks that are responsible for coordinating this all this information about the talent that's in this room, the commitment that's in this room to make these programs happen. Alright folks, it's time to work. Again, we are here at Phyllis Wheatley Community School. This is meeting number three. Everything that you need is right in front of you. Now each person, you know me, I just start going, each person has three sheets that are in front of them. So the first thing I want you to make sure you do is you have all three of your sheets. This is how we hit the ground running. Just go into it. So again, right now today we're going to review and discuss the program categories, the needs and solutions at your table or how you want to participate. This is whether the first three sheets are important and the dots on the table are going to be important. I believe each color is going to be a person, right? It doesn't matter. Okay, that probably we'll worry about. What we're going to do is select which Nexus program categories, needs and solutions that you want to be a part of most. So on each sheet you have different colors. It looks like a blue and a light blue and a green and a yellow. Each one of those sections is the Nexus program. Okay, and what we want to do is know where you want to be involved within each one of those programs. Now you don't have to do all six. We just want you to do three. So which one that you have the most passion for is the one that we want you to choose. Now we're going to fill out your three cards for each of the program categories. The needs are solutions that you selected. You may use more than three cards if someone else doesn't want one at the table or if you want to snag some because you want to just do more than three things. If you are at a booth obviously there's not going to be. If you're at a booth please move to a table so you can actually participate in the project. And there's a few open tables over there or there's open chairs over here you can slide in. Now this right here is a diagram of the thing that's on what's on your table. So each one of these portions, each one of these colors is a different type of program. So I was talking to our Phyllis Wheatley alumni representatives and we were talking about doing a historic wall within the new building of the school where we can actually put all the things that Phyllis Wheatley won and the different records that they accomplished throughout the years. So that particular project, which one would that one be in? That would be in cultural. How we keep the culture of the east side of this school within the program. So those are the types of things that we're looking at within these different sections. Now we're going to go around the tables we'll explain some more if you don't understand. Not a problem. So it's time to get to work. All right does everybody feel pretty confident? They got their top three down. Good to go, good to go. Clap your hands if you're done. Because you're so fabulous. Great job, great job. I know you want to help me out and tell me what's your top three that you chose today. Come on girl, get on up here. You want to Amanda? Do me a paper and just stand right over here. Hey guys, my name's Amanda Garcia and I picked educational programs, social programs and physical programs. Fantastic, thank you so much. Let's see what did you pick sir? Give me one that you picked. Education of programs. Education, what was something? Social programs with emphasis on after school. I like it, I like it. After school programs are very important. And you gorgeous, what did you do? What were some of your tops? Topics were the educational, social and cultural programs. Okay, especially social and culture girl. Now I know you guys are one of the alumni here at Phyllis Wheatley Middle School so thank you guys so much for your input. We really, really needed you here. And I'm looking forward to some social events girl. I want to know what's going on. Alright, sir, what was your top one? The top one was, what was that? Social? What was the main part in social that you liked? After school programs? Fantastic, fantastic. What about you sir? What was your top? Oh you were with the same guys. Okay, let me get one more over here. What about you sir? What was your top over here at this table? Educational and cultural. And cultural, alright. Educational needs, what part of educational? Mentoring. Mentoring, also very, very important for our community. Alright everybody, give yourself a round of applause. I am excited. We're about to move on to the second phase of this whole thing. Now I did get a question earlier that kind of said how are we going to know that these programs are going to be implemented? Because y'all are going to help. That's why. This is what today was about. What would you volunteer for? Where would you be at? What would you help us with? Because the one thing we don't want to do is have people outside of our community coming in our community to build our programs. And then we lose our voice one more time. So again, thank you so much for your input today. One final thing that we want to tell you, but while he is doing that, please grab your evaluation sheet. That's on the table. If you don't have one, I will come bring you one. Let us know what you think. The good, bad, and the ugly. So we can improve anything that we need to improve, okay? And you can guys do that right now. Stephen. Okay, now we're going to close up with a little more of a presentation. We've talked all this whole three meetings. We've talked about the Wheatley School site. But the Promise neighborhood, the Choice neighborhood, the Promise zone, if you look at the maps, you know, this is just the Promise neighborhood and Choice neighborhoods, and this whole area is the Promise zone. And that's where there's a lot of money coming in to $80 million coming into that Promise zone. Wheatley School, the Wheatley School Community Center is just the hub of all the stuff that's going on and can go on, but it needs to be centered here. That's the theory. That's the concept. We've talked about this nexus of these six different areas, physical, cultural, social, that you've been working on, for example. But that applies not only on the school site, but it also applies throughout that whole neighborhood. Right? There's physical programs going on in the neighborhood. There's cultural programs in the neighborhood. So what are we going to talk about now? Wait a minute. Go back. Like I said, everything we've been talking about so far is about that Wheatley site. Let's talk about things that are going on outside of this site, but in the neighborhood. Right? Look at them. We've got the Wheatley Courts Project. If this is the Wheatley School site, we've got the Wheatley Courts Project over here. We've got a possibility for there's a big green space over there. Let's dream a little bit. How about if that green space right over there, you can see it from here if you look out the door. How about if that could be an environmental education center for the Wheatley School. It's not on the Wheatley School site right now, but with a little work, it could be. It could be a park. It could be an education center that's connected with the Wheatley School. We also have the Sutton Oaks Project. The blue is the housing, like the Wheatley Courts Project and the Sutton Oaks Project. That's already built and underway. Nobody figured out yet what AT&T Center role might be in this big development, in this big change of East Point. There's the Tynan Early Childhood Center. There's the new early college that Superintendent Perez has gotten started over at the St. Philip's College, the St. Philip's Early College Program, where the students in this neighborhood will be able to, while they're still in high school, will be able to take college level courses. That's underway. There's also money set aside to look at the whole New Bromphill corridor and how it might be improved, how a different, more retail might come in, what jobs might be brought in for the community. That's a whole project that's already being funded to look at that whole corridor. There's also the Bowdoin School. There's a great asset in the community. And there's programs going on, some of the programs, like similar to what we talked about. There's Medicaid programs. Well, there's programs already going on at Ella Austin, before school, after school, adult education, those kinds of things that need to be a part of this bigger picture. So we want to be sure, we want to be sure we're not just looking at this site. We're looking at how this site connects to all those other things that are going on out there and that they work together and not independent of each other. It's important to know that right now we're talking about the very beginning of this project, right? But I want you to know that we've been through this many, many times, and I'm going to walk you through right now a project that we started 10 years ago in New Orleans, before Hurricane Katrina in a neighborhood just like this. Economically disadvantaged, very, very culturally rich. And we had meetings just like this. We had people just like you signing up, put me down for this, put me down for that. I want to be participating in this. I want to be participating in that. And we had used that same nexus framework. We said, okay, in the physical domain, what are all the things that you want to see change in the next 10 years in Central City, New Orleans? And the community said this is on our list. And then we also went, Bobby? Bobby? The cultural domain. In Central City, we have the Mardi Gras Indians. We have jazz. We have all kinds of things that really weren't taken advantage of. You have a lot of those cultural assets here. We know, not exactly the same ones, but we know for one day for sure this is a culturally rich neighborhood. A lot of diversity and richness here. So how would we take advantage of that? Bobby, go back. So how would we take advantage of that by increasing the awareness and developing some of these programs, these cultural programs like you're talking about? In the social domain, the community said they needed health clinics. They needed housing. And right now, all of those things exist in New Orleans. The public housing has been completely rebuilt. In the same way it's being started to be rebuilt here. On the educational domain, a community school was created, much like the Wheatley School that we're talking about now. And all of these different kinds of programs that we're talking about, co-locating and co-working with the community school, they're already in place. We've invited the superintendent, Superintendent Perez and some other folks to come over and kick the tires. You know what I mean? Touch it. Feel it. Talk to the people that did it. It's not theory. This is how it's actually happening. And also on the economic domain, for example, there are a lot of jobs that got created. In fact, some of those people who signed up for those programs like you did tonight to help out with those programs, they now have full-time jobs running those programs. And we're going to introduce the superintendent to those people and hear their stories about how they started with the idea of a program and now they're running that program. Now they're writing grants to get money to keep funding those programs. In the organizational domain, listen to this. There were probably 25 different organizations in the Central City community 10 years ago. Now there's an umbrella organization called the Central City Renaissance Alliance that was created out of a meeting like this. All of the organizations said, if we work together, we can get a lot more than if we work against each other. So they're banded together and they formed something called the Funders Forum. So all the foundations, all the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and all these people came in and they said, well, we don't know whether to give money to this group or that group but the organization pulled together and they said, you're not going to have to worry about that in our community because we're going to get together and we're going to decide who we want you to give the money to and we're going to share it with each other. And you know what the foundations did? They doubled the amount of money they were given because they knew that it wasn't going to be wasted and the community wasn't going to be fighting over it. So that's another thing that happened. Our point is by looking at all of these things together, the physical planning, the cultural planning, the social planning, the financial planning, the jobs planning together, you can get a whole lot more than if you look at them individually, right? And that's what's happening here right now tonight and that's what's moving forward with this community school and what we did was we asked the community in this process in New Orleans and you might want to do this sometime yourself here on the scale of 1 to 10. Well, they started off way down on the low-end side and now they're way up on the high-end side. So it's an opportunity for improvement. Back up. Bottom line is we're about to close this thing down. You told us in the last meeting put us to work, put the community to work. And with the superintendent Perez about two weeks ago, he said, I can't believe that the community said that. He said, I'm so excited to hear that the community really wants to do this because the school district really has a hard time. They got to educate kids every day. They can't do this kind of a program. It takes the community doing it. And now that you guys are stepping up to the plate, here's where we are right now. We're in July. This is the third community meeting. We've had one community meeting in May, one in June, and this is the third one in July. We're going to produce a report that's going to go to the school district and back to you guys sometime in August. In September, there's going to be an opening event. The school board member announced today that there's going to be an opening event and in the first few months up until January of this year, of next year, some of those programs that are going to be operating outside of the school time are going to be implemented. And then the building is going to get renovated to whatever needs for safety so that in January of 2015 the full-blown community school can start operating with at least three of the programs that you guys have suggested. So that's kind of where we are. There will be Mr. McClaren who's just walked back in the room has indicated that there will be more community meetings. They haven't been scheduled yet but there will be one in the fall to bring everybody up to speed again with what's going on. In addition to the opening event or the phase one opening event that will happen sometime around September there will be an additional community meeting happening this fall so everybody can keep track of what's going on and see how you can continue to participate and celebrate. And then along the way the plans will be done to make sure that the building is safe and secure for these programs opening up in September and then everybody will have a plan like this so you'll know where all the programs are going to be going on in different colors. At the end of the day some of you might have been involved in the early presentation that we made about how all this works and the best example I can show you is what happened tonight because everybody was working together tonight. Have you ever noticed like birds when they flock together it's a beautiful thing to watch it's kind of like what happens when communities flock together right when birds flock together they make beautiful patterns and they don't bang into each other they know they know where the next bird is and they're flying together they're not flying into each other not fighting with each other I think where we are tonight at the end of this meeting is we're flocking we got the beginning of the process where everybody knows here's the part I'm going to play I'm not going to play your part but here's the part I can play I'm going to expect you to play your part I'm going to expect Perez superintendent to play his part I'm going to expect the mayor to play his part everybody plays their part I promise you you will get there so I want to thank everybody for coming out tonight putting your heart and soul into it and at this stage of the game there's nothing but blue sky ahead for this project thank you alrighty people thank you guys so much and I appreciate everybody staying around everybody fill out the evaluation form because again this isn't the first or this isn't the last meeting this is just the last meeting of this particular phase so as we get into the next phases we want to make sure whatever it is that we do so I'm going to give away some free stuff this is where y'all screaming yeah woohoo free stuff okay who is under the age of 10 in here come up here one you got some young legs so you can go quickly oh here we go uh oh there's two of them who's going to get here first boom what's your name Carlos hi Carlos good he said I'm good alright what do you want to be when you grow up Carlos policeman ooh a policeman man we've got some programs for you we're going to work right on out you'll be able to come in secure everybody at the future fill it sweetly what's your name sincere that's beautiful how old are you 8 a firefighter a policeman and a firefighter y'all give it up for our precious babies in the house we just love them we trying to build a school for you guys so you can be nice and smart and give us money when we get old take care of us like we take care of you now alright so here we go okay this is what I need to help you I need your help okay raise your hand who doesn't have a ticket alright so what I want you to do honey is shake the bag shake shake shake now do a little dance while you shake it yes now is that good now put your hand in there and swirl it around okay now you pretty girl you go in there and you pick one out of there alright now give it Carlos right okay now give it to him and he is going to read it now you read those numbers uh oh there is a name right there read the name can you see it butch Howard say butch Howard there he is say there he is say woohoo come on down butch Howard you are the winner of today's oh it's this okay oh goodness what's in here you should have told me that before I picked the ticket do you know what you won okay hold this hold this for him now brace yourself because he is about to give you a big hug you just won a two night stay in New Orleans yeah for real there you go give it to him there is some New Orleans paraphernalia in there for you and we treat you to a two night stay isn't that awesome you so surprised thank you so much this is what happens when you come out and put your voice in the community give him a round of applause everybody give everybody a round of applause and I need the table host table host could you please come right over here with me please you guys have also won something you get to work at the next meeting the two night stay was a gift from Concordia so thank you guys so very much for that that was absolutely awesome and can you all please give it up for our table host that have been here probably everybody for the last few meetings trying to keep everything organized and you know we'll be here to do it again so again thank you guys for everything you can go home now we finished way early which is thanks to you putting in all your hard work we'll see you next time we'll make sure we keep you informed please continue to look at east point website facebook facebook page that way you can stay update on all the wonderful events that are going on here in your east side community